Interesting that the “All employees” option will only be available to paid up members, but is free for now.

Uses?

If you wanted to work for specific organisations, you can now subscribe to them to receive an email when they post a new job (assuming they used LinkedIn to do so of course).. probably has some uses for recruiters too.

One idea that I’d suggest to any organisation looking to recruit, is to monitor if anyone is following your company page – I think it’s interesting that you could see potential candidates before posting a job advert.

Do you think this is a useful feature? I can’t see much use in it yet (apart from recruitment), if it published the news items into people’s feed it would be more useful.

See also: LinkedIn Blog about following company pages

What’s the right mix for status updates (or tweets)?

I’d summarise it as the following:

• Frequency
• Relevance
• Personality
• Purpose
• Consistency

All of these are underpinned by the central question you should ask yourself – what do the people following me, who subscribe to these updates expect?

I sometimes see status updates, used for two different things, when really they should use two streams or types of resource.

A good example of this was the event that prompted the discussion, a bar in Bournemouth began posting every record played, as it happened.

• Some people loved it.
• Some people hated it so much they sent abusive messages to the bar.
• Most people were either indifferent, or switched off without saying anything.

Then the bar apologised… and the usual war of words/trolls began, but it was this bit that stood out for me:

A: “If you don’t like the updates unfollow”

B: “I want updates, just not a flood of them!”

A valued follower, taking the time to say “less updates” – I wish I could look back, or measure how many people either unfollowed or hid updates from this bar – it’d be very interesting numbers.

Anyway, the moral for me is – horses for courses – there is a place for the track-listing high frequency type updates, but maybe it wasn’t the same as the general stream – is that true for your business?

Listen to what your customers/users/followers tell you, with an eye on the quiet many – in the case above, the silent majority and the smallest minority that commented negatively were the voices that needed to be heard and not those of the vocal supporters (who interestingly mostly came round to the 2 stream idea, after I proposed it).

Have consistency with how/when/why you tweet/blog/update – occasional changes (like if you’re at a conference) can be accepted, of course.

hat tip to @tomharvey888 who sent me this:

RT @bengie Has your facebook been running slow? Go to “Settings” > “application settings” > “added to profile”. delete “unnamed application” -> spybot

Do i have the so called Facebook Application spybot? Apparently so.

Clicking settings will cause an unknown error and the application profile does not exist (it will redirect you to home).

I’m not convinced this is malicious and with no evidence to suggest it is a spybot (would love to hear from you, if you do with a source), I remind you of the SULFNBK.EXE (Symantec) fake alert inviting you to delete a file that was actual an integral part of windows.

I think the most likely explanation for this unnamed app is a leftover from a now removed function – perhaps one from before the profile view was changed.

To remove or not to remove the Facebook spybot? …that is the question.

I’d like to hear from anyone who does not find this when they follow the instructions above, so far everyone I know who has tried this did… which would suggest to me it’s more likely a remnant as above.

Thoughts, screenshots… all welcome below.

It used to be that the status updates on LinkedIN were actually quite useful, to see what people were up to, get a snapshot of what they are/were working on… but alas no more.

Given the option to link a twitter account to LinkedIN (good) most people have chosen to send ALL tweets to LinkedIN (bad) rather than use the selective “#in” option which only sends selected tweets to LinkedIN (good).

The result?

The status updates are all RT’s (the twitter version of forwards) and off topic, no where near as useful as it used to be.

To me, it devalues the activity stream quite a bit – which is kind of a pity as the other things on there are still great – Q+A, groups, events…

Have you noticed this too, or is it just my network of people?

Please, if you link twitter and Facebook together use the selective updates function – make sure your messages are “fit for purpose”, does everything you tweet, really need to be on LinkedIN?

Select “edit my profile”, then click on the “edit” link next to your twitter username and select the option highlighted below.

Next time you want to send something to LinkedIn just include “#in” in your message.

Thanking you in advance… Luke.

———

Luke Williams on LinkedIN – I run 1/2 day LinkedIN courses in London and Bournemouth if you’d like to make more of this great business platform.

1) Set friendly URLs (pagenames), ie: facebook.com/yourname – facebook.com/username – Works for personal profiles and pages (once you have 25+ fans).

2) Widgets, fanboxes  and other cross site badges are all on the widgets page.

3) Link twitter accounts to pages or personal accounts facebook.com/twitter – also use this page to change the way your updates are linked and what kind of items are shared.

4) Set up your adverts at facebook.com/advertising – alos handy to see how large a given demographic is, try stepping throughmaking an advert up to the advert target seletion – it will tell you the number of users you could target.

5) Its also very handy to be a “Fan” of Facebook pages (or subscribe to the RSS feed) so you see any updates or new features when they’re announced.

One for my fellow geeks: If you’re thinking of customising the look and feel of your page, or would like to build your own applications, you’ll need the developer resources page for all things FBML.

Handy tip for mobile users: If you use the touch.facebook.com site, choosing friends and then pages gives you quick access to send out updates to your pages – any you are admin for will appear at the top of the list. On m.facebook.com (older non-touch-screen phones) this still works except pages you admin are not listed first… I don’t know why, they just aren’t!

If you find these links/hints helpful, please take 2 seconds to bookmark it somewhere (I use delicious) or share it on with someone else via email, twitter or courier pigeon.

This video I took of the “Roar on the shore – world record firework attempt” has just topped 87,000 hits – moving on from the fact, it looked pathetic, apparently it was a record.

I thought I’d use this as an example to show you the stats most people don’t seem to realise are available on YouTube (just under the video in a drop down)

The beauty of these are that anyone can see the stats by default… so if you wanted to see what makes some videos get such high views, go and look at a few that are similar and highly ranked to see where they got their traffic from.

I’ve also found that I’m using twitter more as a micro-blog and using this less, so if you wan’t to keep up to date with articles I think are worth sharing and other useful stuff, make sure you’re following me on twitter.

There are 2 things from all of this travelling and time away from the office I do want to write about:

1) I was asked during one of my sessions if twitter was “just the current thing”. Yes, Twitter may be a fad, micro-blogging / the real-time web / status updating is not.  For this reason, I make sure that any training is focussed on use of the tool and less on the tool itself.  Understanding why the way we use the internet is changing and how to utilise that, is far more valuable than a how-to twitter session.

2) Please remember that presentations are visual. I sat through a couple of talks at Internet World 09 and I have to say I was mostly dis-appointed (only one, on an exhibitor stand was the exception) – One session seemed to be behind the times, mentioning a technology that will “probably become available in the next year or so”… that I already use and in another the presenter just read off his slides (and people left during the talk). I won’t write an essay here on good presentation, but this is a basic point – DON’T READ OFF SLIDES! Slides should be used to re-inforce what you’re talking about, to offer visual interpretation of a concept or to entertain… not to mirror your speech, people read faster than they speak so your audience will finish before you’ve explained it.

I’ll add to this post a diagram of how all my RSS/twitter stuff floats around the interwebs later

1) Create sock puppets – Copy the example of Cllr ben Grower , caught out today for creating an anonymous username to post comments on the Daily Echo website and then using this account to praise himself and fellow councillors.

Special deals on reduced honesty – whip up your very own social media storm by getting caught out, what are you waiting for?

(Ed: Not only was he caught because he used an email address with his name in it (duuuh), he then denied he was involved – his dishonesty is really quite shocking.)

2) Place you fingers in your ears and sceam “la la la la la” – A sure fire way of failing to market yourself and your business online is not to listen.

Follow the lead of industry giants like Sony, ignore the build up of sentiment by just sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming… you’ll feel grrrreat and if you’re really lucky and you continue doing this long enough, you too could have a class action law suit!

3) Boast boast boast! Want to be the envy of everyone? Don’t bother actually being the best, just tell everyone you’re the best… boasting, worked great for Matt Bacak.

(Ed: actually he has got a lot of press…)

But wait… we’ll throw in one more bonus never-fails to fail tidbit for FREE, yes FREE

4) SPAM SPAM SPAM – Don’t bother engaging with your audience, just shout at them enough – never fails to fail.

Social Tech Solutions is an ethical Social Media Marketer – terms and conditions apply – things in this post may be satirical, if in doubt you should consult your nearest village idiot.

We’ve all had them at some point in time “Send this to Bill Gates and 20 friends, he’ll send you a million dollars” for example, they may seem harmless and the opinion is often, well I’ll forward it in case… This kind of ‘too good to be true’ scenario is just that.

But why would anyone bother going to the trouble of starting this kind of chain mail?

Think about the bandwidth that gets wasted, let alone the time for people to click delete or the extra split-second to retrieve your email.

But more importantly, you are enabling thousands of personal emails (often including valuable information like a person’s workplace and telephone number) to potentially get into the hands of internet fraudsters.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant from Sophos warned last year: ‘I would advise users intent on sharing these chain emails to check the website of the company apparently making the offer to determine its authenticity, before deciding to click the ‘forward’ button.’

Simple logical advice.

But this is just chain emails and for most of you (I hope) preaching to the converted… what this lead me onto was to consider some of the “harmless” apps that are available on sites like facebook.

Remember the school yard “What is your pornstar name?” lets imagine there is a Facebook app that shows you my “pornstar name” and asks you for yours… not sure what yours is? Well, its your mothers maiden name and your first pet…

…hold on a minute…

…what would be two key security questions you might need to retrieve a lost password? How many profiles include an email address on facebook – combine the two by “allowing this application to access data about you” and an innocent app suddenly has very real and valuable information.

Social Engineering is about exploiting your very human desire to share, in clever ways to extract information about you and those around you.

The most successful viruses of recent times, have been the most simple – sending an infected zip file with a title that entices you to open it. No amount of clever protection can save you from yourself!